een Lady Littleton, the daughter of Earl
Spencer, one of the most accomplished and lovely women of England, and
Benjamin Rush, Minister to the Court of St. James, in the course of
which Mr. Rush suggested the propriety of giving out under his official
seal that Irving was the author of "Waverley." "Geoffrey Crayon is the
most fashionable fellow of the day," wrote the painter Leslie. Lord
Byron, in a letter to Murray, underscored his admiration of the author,
and subsequently said to an American, "His Crayon,--I know it by heart;
at least, there is not a passage that I cannot refer to immediately."
And afterwards he wrote to Moore, "His writings are my delight." There
seemed to be, as some one wrote, "a kind of conspiracy to hoist him over
the heads of his contemporaries." Perhaps the most satisfactory evidence
of his popularity was his publisher's enthusiasm. The publisher is an
infallible contemporary barometer.

It is worthy of note that an American should have captivated public
attention at the moment when Scott and Byron were the idols of the
English-reading world.

In the following year Irving was again in England, visiting his sister
in Birmingham, and tasting moderately the delights of London. He was,
indeed, something of an invalid. An eruptive malady,--the revenge
of nature, perhaps, for defeat in her earlier attack on his
lungs,-appearing in his ankles, incapacitated him for walking, tormented
him at intervals so that literary composition was impossible, sent
him on pilgrimages to curative springs, and on journeys undertaken for
distraction and amusement, in which all work except that of seeing and
absorbing material had to be postponed. He was subject to this recurring
invalidism all his life, and we must regard a good part of the work he
did as a pure triumph of determination over physical discouragement.
This year the fruits of his interrupted labor appeared in "Bracebridge
Hall," a volume that was well received, but did not add much to his
reputation, though it contained "Dolph Heyliger," one of his most
characteristic Dutch stories, and the "Stout Gentleman," one of his
daintiest and most artistic bits of restrained humor.--['I was once'
says his biographer reading aloud in his presence a very flattering
review of his works, which, had been sent him by the critic in 1848, and
smiled as I came to this sentence: 'His most comical pieces have always
a serious end in view.'--'You laugh,' said he, but it is t